[arachne] Re: OS advocacy

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, Udo Kuhnt wrote: 
Apart from the fact that DOS also has this, just try to rename "usr" to
"user" on Linux and see what it breaks.


Yah, and rename your dos directory to sumthin' else and see what
happens.


While the changes required are more or less depending, all
seem to have this issue to some degree. It doesn't seem to be
more pronounced in linux than in other OSs. But maybe I just
didn't notice.


Well, try to write a program for Linux in Assembly language in a way
that it will also work on other kernels and you will see what I mean.

Ever heard of POSIX? 

the difficulty to uninstall software
again,


Most versions have a very easy to use installer/uninstaller.
apt and urpm are two. Just one simple command to uninstall or
install


This would require the installer to know which program one is trying to
uninstall and which files belong to it. Which in fact means that someone
would have to tell it. In DOS I can simply delete a directory to
uninstall a program; there is no need to look in several system
directories for its remains.


the need to recompile almost everything if one downgrades to
an
older component, the necessity to mount removable media
before accessing
them and unmount them before removing them again,


Mounting and unmounting is mostly automatic these days. I hear
this argument a lot. But in several major distros it works
just like you'd expect. You put the removable media in and it
works. You take it out when you're done and that's it. That's
it. You do have the option of making it work the old, harder
way if you like. But that's up to you.


Well, if you refer to Supermount, I had to look for it on the Internet
and manually patch the kernels before recompiling them and edit the
fstab file before it would work as expected. Also, it is an awkward
mechanism that adds an extra device that only does the mounting. That is
not what I would call native support for removable media. Also, the
problem that removable disks have to be linked into the root partition
tree remains. So much to the flexibility of the directory structure.

All that's needed is the name of the program, in Slack,
"removepkg nameofprogram", RPM is just as easy.
All I do to access a floppy is type "fd", no harder than "a:"
"ufd" to umount.

the bloated X-Windows, 

I run Slack on a Packard Bell with 32Megs RAM and a 66Mhz cpu, That's
hardly bloated.


It is not even the insane amount of memory that X-Windows needs, it is
that it tries to emulate a remote server even if both are on the same
machine. That is so typical of the Unix world - using something that was
written for a totally different purpose just because it is already
there.

and of course, the inability to run PC software other then in
an
emulator -


I don't have to run any emulators. But I don't run DOS programs in
Linux, I run Linux programs.

That is an issue. But since I'm doing my best to only use
multiplatform foss these days, it's less of an issue for me.
The exception is when I have to for work. Then I use a
'commercial' machine anyway.


Well, I do not really care if software is free or not as long as I like
it and want to use it. In fact, if I had to choose between two similar
products, one commercial and one not, I would choose the one that is
better suited for the purpose I have in mind, no matter whether it is
Open Source software or not.

I know that most people seem to want everything for free, but in fact, I
would rather pay a lot of money for a product that has been designed for
DOS and would run out-of-the-box then use an Open Source product that I
would have to rewrite first to suite my taste. Besides, you would be
surprised how much there is in a typical Linux distribution is *not*
Open Source.

Regards,

Udo 

You've never met a DOS program you didn't want to rewrite? Also all
the source code for my Slack system came with it.

One last question. If DOS is the OS of the future, why are you only
going for 32bit? Everyone else is going 64bit. No one else is using
4, 8, 12, or 16bit anymore 'except in DOS', and 32bit is going the
same way.

Rob:

Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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